Review
Raymond Flynn - A Fine Body of Men & A Public Body
Hodder £16.99 & NEL Pbk. £5.99.
Both of these books are Eddathorpe Mysteries, as was their predecessor, Seascape with Body, which was Raymond Flynn's first book.  Eddathorpe is an east coast seaside resort where the hero, Robert Graham, is a Detective Inspector.  He has been banished to Eddathorpe as a direct consequence of confrontation with a senior policeman at his old force who had been having an affair with his wife, Angela.  Angie is back with Graham and pregnant in A Public Body and the mother of a baby girl, Laura, in A Fine Body of Men. 
Note the presence of the word "Body" in the titles of all three books and the inevitability,  perhaps,  of  A Fine Body of  Men,   It is another illustration of the tendency of some authors to choose a thematic link for all their books, as in the alphabet books of Sue Grafton or the colour titles of John D Macdonald's Travis McGee books. 
A Public Body is concerned as much with local government corruption as it  is  with murder.   The  mayor-elect, Muriel  Lynch,  is  murdered  and  her colourful alcoholic husband, Klondyke Bill, also a councillor and the first choice for mayor elect is the chief suspect.  Indeed Bill is arrested for her murder by detective Superintendent  Hacker, "the best-hated senior officer in the Eastern district". Hacker is incompetent and inefficient and a nice example of a men who has been promote above his station.  Such  promotions occur in other walks of life, of course, to the dismay of abler subordinates. 
 Hacker is pensioned off in A Fine Body of Men,but the rivalry is continued, this time between  Graham and an officer of equal rank, Chris Bowyer, who is sycophantic and unpleasant to underlings.  Bowyer is eventually promoted to Chief Inspector.  In this later book Graham investigates the murder of a drifter, Vince Lowther, alias Mick McGrath, whose body is found on the beach.  Bowyer and his team try to make things as difficult as possible for Graham and once again the chief suspect is eventually proved to be innocent before Graham unmasks the real murderer, Graham is rewarded with his own promotion to Detective Chief Inspector. 
Raymond Flynn writes fluently and well.   His similes are neat ("Half a dozen courageous tourers occupied the central patch, huddling together like wagons in fear of an Indian attack") and his observations often amusing ("Another thing I hate about women - their effortless talent for being right") and he likes to pepper his text with literary allusions ("And all the time our troops kept bringing the bad news from Aix to Ghent - well, to Eddathorpe nick anyway").  It all makes compulsive reading and one looks forward to the next Eddathorpe mystery. 
JOHN BOYLES